Supply chain management is a common problem for any organization that deals with the transportation of a large number of goods over a wide geographic area. Businesses that routinely lose goods or otherwise mismanage their supply chain are doomed to failure. This is especially true for manufacturing companies, where the successfull supply of raw materials to make components, and components to make goods, is essential to survival. Unfortunately, until recently, many of these companies were forced to track goods using manually prepared inventory reports, which required individuals at various locations to check the contents of incoming containers and write down the contents on a clipboard. The reports could then be reviewed if trouble with the transport or inaccuracies later occurred.
With the advent of computers, systems were created that partially automated the collection and/or gathering process. Bar code readers could be used to collect data on incoming goods, but manual intervention was still needed to get inventory information into a form that could be easily transferred to a central location. Data mining techniques were used to collect data from various warehouses using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) interactions. This data was stored in centralized databases. Errors were still encountered, however, during the manual intervention processes, usually during punching keys on an EDI terminal.
There was also a significant latency problem with the systems used in the past. Data collected by a collection point such as a clipboard or bar code reader would oftentimes not be entered into the EDT for several hours, normally at the end of each business day, and the information would be transferred in batches. This introduced errors of its own, as instantaneous tracking of goods was not available and it was possible for the system to indicate that the same item was in two separate locations at the same time (for example, if the item was shipped from one location to another in the same town during the same day).
Additionally, item tracking was limited to single item tracking. Namely, tracking merely involved indicating when a given container was received, but no mechanism was in place to track the individual items within the container, or items within those items (multi-tiered items). This severely limited the application of the system in the view of companies with more complex tracking needs, where items may be removed from containers at various locations through the supply chain.
What is needed is a system that provides for automated tracking of items without significant latency, and which allows for the tracking of multi-tiered items.